Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2022 från Outside

Trusting the Process Working in the media business requires getting comfortable with a wide range of story-telling speeds. In the digital realm, being the first to report on a story is almost as important as getting it right, and a news event that happens at 8 A.M. often has to be turned into a published piece within an hour or two. Print, of course, lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s not unusual for a year to go by between assigning a longform feature to a writer and sending the finished product off to the printer. Delayed gratification is part of the job, but I can’t remember a piece that tested my patience—or the author’s perseverance—more than this issue’s profile of Kurt Steiner (“School of Rocks,” page 82),…

A FEW YEARS AGO, I spent a week cycling through the Italian and French Alps with a deluxe tour group whose selling point was a pre- and post-ride dose of electric brain stimulation. Protocols were based on what the Bahrain Merida cycling team was trying at the time, zapping neurons to enhance performance and recovery. I wanted to know whether the technology worked, but I was also wrestling with a more nebulous question: Would reaching each day’s summit a few minutes sooner actually make my trip better? If I was one of the Bahrain Merida riders in that summer’s Tour de France, the answer would be obvious. Winning races is a lot more fun than the alternative. But any competitive edge is short-lived. “Once an effective technology gets adopted in…

1. CAMP IN THE NORTHWOODS Where: ROAM ADVENTURE BASECAMP, SEELEY, WISCONSIN With 30 tent sites, four winterized cabins, a wood-fired Finnish sauna, and hot showers, this 96-acre campground in northwestern Wisconsin is a cushy oasis. But what really sets it apart is access to the adjacent Seeley Pass trailhead, your personal entrance to a more than 300-mile network of Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association trails, which are also popular for hiking and running. Roam is an ideal base for the annual Chequamegon Mountain Bike Festival, this year held September 17, whose 40-mile mountain-bike race is one of just six events in the inaugural, nationwide Life Time Grand Prix series. Worried about rowdy midnight revelers next door? No need—most campers are so worn out, they’re fast asleep by 9 P.M. Adventures: Tick…

On a clear-skied morning in March, Kurt “Mountain Man” Steiner stood at a lonely bend of Sinnemahoning Creek, deep inside Pennsylvania’s Elk State Forest. He was dressed in a black hoodie and Dollar General jeans that hid his athletic 56-year-old frame, and wore a brown beanie that pressed his long gray hair and Rasputinesque beard into a single wild mane. Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an L, clasping a coaster-size sliver of shale the way a guitarist might hold a plectrum during a showstopping solo. But rather than fold his torso horizontally, as you might expect somebody skipping a rock to do, he stretched his five-foot-nine-inch body vertically, and then squeezed down like an accordion and planted his left leg to crack his throwing arm,…

NINE YEARS AGO, when my oldest son was in kindergarten, his 6.5-hour school day included just 15 minutes of outdoor recess. That paltry interval was typical of our Minnesota public-school district. Worse, bad weather periodically meant that kids were kept inside to play, sometimes on screens. By first grade, our five-year-old, who was brimming with energy he should have burned through on the playground, started getting in trouble for wrestling his classmates. His punishment: staying inside during recess. I still get angry when I think about all this, because it was clear then, as it is now, that time outdoors is good for children’s physical and mental health. In recent years, the evidence has only increased: studies consistently show that getting outside boosts kids’ test scores, reduces stress, and improves…

ROLAND WELKER brushes burning coals from the blackened carcass of a porcupine roasting over a crackling campfire. “I did manage to graduate high school for Mom and Dad,” he says, as a video camera captures him tending to the dead rodent. “But since then, I’ve been running it hard. I wasn’t around much for them.” The footage is from the History Channel survival show Alone, in which ten wilderness junkies live in complete isolation in the great outdoors, assisted by ten survival items. They film themselves hunting, making shelter, and enduring months of solitude. The last one to quit takes home $500,000. The seventh season, in which Welker appears, was filmed in the fall of 2019 on the banks of Canada’s Great Slave Lake. Prior to the porcupine cookout, the…

It’s not like my family actually went through the exercise of picking a spirit tree for each of us, but if we had, my parents would have picked coastal redwoods. My dad grew up in Larkspur, California, on San Francisco Bay, in a house built beneath redwoods so big that he, his three brothers, and his sister couldn’t have linked arms around them. My mom met my dad in Arcata, on California’s northern coast, where they went to Humboldt State University. Poor and crafty, and anxious to prove that they could make their way in the world, both took a job with an old logger who sold restored redwood timber. My mom graded milled boards according to the clarity and straightness of the grain. My dad salvaged old-growth trees that other…

I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll start with the hardest part: when you’re a woman who wants children, but you waited too long and now the odds are getting worse every year, it’s hard to find anything sweet about your birthday cake. Most of the time, watching your fertile years drip away feels like watching a leak in a bathroom faucet. Maybe tomorrow you’ll deal with it. Birthdays, however, are like being thrown face-first into a swimming pool. Another year gone, and you’re just dog-paddling through all that wasted time. “Body, why can’t you do this one thing?” you ask yourself over and over. For my 37th birthday, I tried easing my splash into the deep end with something soft. Like, literally soft. I begged my…